4000-Foot Coral Reef Sits in the Middle of Australian Desert, Scientists Rethink "Featureless" Description

Scientists have to reevaluate the description of the Australian desert as being "featureless" in light of the discovery of the remains of a 4000-foot coral reef that is millions of years old and was located in the middle of the desert.

The reef was discovered in Nullarbor Plain, located in southern Australia, which is now a 76,000-square-mile desert made of limestone bedrock. However, during the Cenozoic era, about 14 million years ago, a tropical ocean washed over it.

On fresh, high-resolution satellite imagery, the reef can be seen as a bull's-eye shape by researchers from the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University in Perth. The discovery cast doubt on their prior beliefs that the Nullarbor Plain had never had any features.

Nullarbor Plain + High-Resolution Satellite Imagery

Milo Barham, a geologist from Curtin University, said in a statement that large portions of the Nullarbor Plain, in contrast to many other regions of the world, have largely escaped the weathering and erosion processes endured over millions of years, making it a special geological canvas that captures ancient history in remarkable ways. Barham is a co-author of the study.

He added that the team has discovered the first of this kind of landform on the Nullarbor Plain using high-resolution satellite imagery and fieldwork, which is a clear remnant of a previous sea-bed structure left intact for millions of years.

Past Life of a Desert

Modern Australia has been dry for the most part, with 18% of the nation being classified as desert. However, Australia was covered in rainforests and seas for hundreds of millions of years, including the ocean that once submerged the Nullarbor Plain.

According to a paper published in the journal Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, the coral reef structure has a central dome shape and a circular elevated rim. The building has a diameter of 3,950 to 4,250 feet.

The structure also differs from other plain landforms and cannot be accounted for by any of the local geological processes, according to the paper.

Barham pointed out that the ring-shaped 'hill' preserves the original microbial textures as well as the features commonly found in the modern Great Barrier Reef but cannot be explained by extraterrestrial impact or any recognized deformation processes.

Due to the researchers' access to fresh, high-resolution satellite imagery, they have been able to identify much more subtle Nullarbor Plain features. They discovered this made them realize it wasn't the featureless, static landscape they had assumed it to be after its ocean dried up.

Barham said that an archive of ancient landscapes, as well as a record of the predominant winds, are preserved by the channels of long-gone rivers and dune systems marked directly into limestone.

Landscape, Wildlife, Meteorites

Additionally, he said that it wasn't just landscapes. Mummified remains of Tasmanian tigers as well as complete skeletons of long-extinct marvels like Thylacoleo, the marsupial lion, are preserved in isolated cave shafts that punctuate the Nullarbor Plain.

In their quest to understand more about the origins of our solar system and of Earth itself, researchers may benefit from further investigation of the Nullarbor's geology.

Barham further said that the Nullarbor Plain has left intact a significant number of meteorites at the surface due to relatively stable conditions, allowing researchers to look back in time to the beginnings of our solar system.

He continued to say that these features effectively turn the Nullarbor Plain into a place that time forgot and provide an intriguing deeper understanding of Earth's history when combined with the millions of years old landscape features that the team has now identified, Newsweek reports.